


change of heart

by pugglemuggle



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (sort of), Allura (Voltron)-centric, Allura Angst, Angst, Character Study, Five Stages of Grief, Gen, either way there is a lot going on here, originally published in a zine, the space mice are metaphors for... the paladins? or maybe the lions? idk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-05-29 20:03:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15080693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pugglemuggle/pseuds/pugglemuggle
Summary: Allura has lost everything—her home, her people, her family, her entire culture. The mice shoulder her emotional burdens as best they can.(Or, an exploration of Allura and grief.)





	change of heart

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for and published in [years & years](https://allurazine.tumblr.com), an Allura zine.

How does it feel, to lose everything in an instant?

_ Everything: _ the scale of it is too great to comprehend. When she stumbles out of the cryopod and goes to look at the holographic display, her hands hovering over the Castle of Lions’s glowing control panel, the facts it tells her are simply unfathomable. Ten thousand years. How can she accept the total annihilation of the physical counterpart to every memory she has? The castle florist, her childhood history tutor, the walkway along the river next to Dancer’s Hill, the view of the sunrise over Windshadow Mountain, the sweet voices of the children’s choir, the caterpillars whose silk spun the fabric of her dress, the pink burial shroud that covers her mother in the family tomb—all are gone. Her mind is a museum of lost things, every thought the gateway to a memorial she cannot bear to face.

How does it feel, to lose everything in an instant?

Allura does not know. Her heart has gone numb, and she feels nothing at all.

 

She lets her mice borrow her pain.

It’s cruel and selfish, perhaps, to push the weight of her emotions onto beings so small and devoted, but these feelings—they are more than she can handle. She is not thinking of right or wrong. She is thinking only of escape.

Plachu, Chulatt, Platt, Chuchule—none of them whisper a word of complaint. Her heart stays cold and her mind stays clear. Voltron needs a leader. She has no other choice.

 

The first mouse to fail her is Plachu. 

His fur is dark and his eyes are narrow and red. A couple days after she wakes from the cryopod, she begins to notice him glaring, his gaze seeping into her blood like fire through gasoline. He sears her skin with his stare, and then ignites something deeper. Suddenly, fury is all she can feel. It boils the frost in her heart and forces feeling into the numbness there until rage rips her from her stupor.

She is  _ angry _ .

Zarkon took her world, her people, her entire culture. She wants nothing more than to watch him burn. She wants to see his body go up in flames, hear his screams of agony as the blaze devours his flesh, and turn his empire to ashes.

And so she takes her rage back from her mice and stows it in her heart.

 

The next mouse is Chulatt. She lasts five days.

Her tiny body shivers, so much smaller than the rest of her family. She watches Allura with wide, glassy eyes, cowering, and Allura starts to sense the ropy tendrils reaching out and wrapping themselves around her chest, like ivy strangling an oak. They pull tighter and tighter until finally, she feels it: panic. It spreads quickly, thrusting thick roots into the loam of her heart and forcing shoots through her veins, up, up, up, up until the wide branches cover the canopy and leave the forest below as dark as night.

She is afraid.

She is helpless, one woman against an entire empire that has spread like a weed to every corner of the universe. How can she hope to defeat something so powerful? If she fails, Zarkon will rip away all that is left to hold dear. She wants to flee and hide, sit under the trunk of the tallest tree in Altea and feel small under its shadow. She wants to let the moss creep across her skin and cover her body until she is just another part of the forest floor.

But there are no places to hide. Altea is gone. The fear in her heart is here to stay, and she will let it be her guide.

 

It takes a week for Platt to slip.

He is the largest of the four mice, the strongest, but he can only hold back for so long. He stares at her with a weight so heavy she can almost feel the pressure of it against her skin. He is unmoving, as still as stone. The force of the pressure builds and builds and builds, and then it's as though Allura is carrying an entire mountain on her back. Guilt. It’s a physical thing, the crush of the bedrock of Altea dragging her down so deep that she will soon become something forgotten, a fossil, just like she should have become ten thousand years ago.

She blames herself.

Her people gave their lives to fight Zarkon, and yet somehow she survived. Why her? It should not have been her. She is not ready, she is not wise, she is not the one most fit to take on the most powerful empire the universe has ever seen. She wants to dig into the earth and replace her ancestors’ graves with her own, turn back time and set the cosmos right once more. She should have died with her people. She should have eroded away like dust.

But she can’t. If she does not succeed now, her people’s sacrifice will be for nothing. The guilt, too, makes its home in her heart, and she soldiers on.

 

The last mouse is Chuchule. Her resolve is firm, and her spirit is tough, but the levee cannot hold forever.

She gazes at Allura with damp eyes, tears moistening her pink fur, and it’s like her gaze is leaving trails of ice water over Allura’s face, her neck, her arms, seeping into her clothes until she’s soaked to the bone and shivering. That’s when the sorrow comes. It leaks into her mind, fills every crevasse, every thought, every safe haven. The water sits dark and putrid in her memories until each one rots with mold and mildew, until the joy they once held is turned into a reminder of loss. It’s a despair so profound that she thinks she’s drowning in it, water filling her lungs and she can’t breathe, can’t  _ breathe.  _

This is true anguish.

The tears come so readily now that she wonders how long they’ve been waiting, just beneath the surface. Her father is dead. Her people are dead. Her planet is no more. She is so, horribly, desperately alone, except for Coran, and there are no words to describe the way it empties her, drains her dry. Everything she feels pours out of her until her throat is parched and hoarse and her nose is rubbed raw and her eyes sting each time she blinks. She feels disconnected from her body, almost as though these physical symptoms belong to someone else.

When she looks up, her mice are sitting around her, watching. She does not have the power to pretend to be okay.

“I can’t,” she tells them, her voice so rough she barely recognizes it as her own. “I can’t.”

“You must,” they tell her, and she knows, she  _ knows _ they are right.

Her heart is full of rage and fear and guilt, and with her last vestiges of emotional fortitude, she adds her sorrow there, too. Together, they are strong.

Her grief is not gone. Her grief will never be gone. But for now, the Castle of Lions needs a leader, and she is the only one they have. Her grief drives her. It will not be put to rest, and neither will she.

There is a war to win.


End file.
